Aug 16, 2011 08:20 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla has moved to accelerate Firefox development by switching to a six-weeks release time frame. Every month and a half a new Firefox would be released, Mozilla has already done it twice. One side effect of this is that version numbers add up quickly, work on Firefox 9 is about to get underway.

For Google Chrome, which also comes out every six weeks, this hasn't been much of a problem, it was the strategy Google employed from the get go.

But for Firefox, which took six years to get to version 4, it's a big change. So, in order to pacify users, perhaps, Mozilla is proposing an even bigger one, getting rid of version numbers altogether, at least as far as the regular user is concerned.

"When a user opens the About window for Firefox, the window should say something like 'Firefox checked for updates 20 minutes ago, you are running the latest release'," Mozilla's Asa Dotzler posted in the Firefox Bugzilla.

"It is important to say when the last check happened and ideally to do the check when the dialog is launched so that time is very near and to drop the version and simply tell them they're on the latest or not," he argued.

"If a user needs the full version information they can get it from about:support," he said.

The change may seem like trivial, but it's a major deviation from what is standard across the vast majority of applications and operating system.

The idea is that leaving out the version number from the About box would make for a more seamless user experience, given that there will be more info on how up to date Firefox is.

The reasoning is that, if users know that they're running the latest Firefox, they won't care about the version. What's more, there seems to be a wider plan at Mozilla to deprecate version numbers altogether for Firefox.

The move has been met with quite a lot of skepticism. People argue that the version number should be in the About box, seeing as this is what the dialog is designed for in the first place.

Most users don't even know what the About box is or what it does, but those that do expect it to display the app's name and version number at the very least.

"Simplification and a different meaning for version numbers in a rapid release cycle are one thing, but help->about has been the place for the version number in pretty much every program with a menu for decades," developer Dave Garrett writes, a sentiment echoed by other commenters. [via ExtremeTech]